Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Pycon India 2011, Pune

So I attended Pycon India for the first time in three years it has existed. It was held in Bangalore the previous two years, and I was being lazy.
Ratnadeep was put up at my place. I had originally decided not to attend the tutorials, but then since Ratnadeep wanted to attend, I decided to show up as well.

Day 1

Tutorials on Friday was a bit boring, considering they were long, and I wasn't exactly the student types. Navin Kabra had a session about Web API Programming using Python where I lingered for a while. I did however attend a part of Anand Chitipothu's session on Functional Programming. I liked the slides he made using Landslide. Must check that out sometime.

Day 2

Raymond Hettinger had his keynote on why Python is awesome. His talk highlighted what makes Python different from other languages. Then Anand Chitipothu had a talk on pyjs, which is a way to compile python code into JS. The talk was good, especially the AST parts. After lunch I went to attend Sajjad's talk on developing Android apps using Python. Track 2 was jampacked with more people waiting outside, so the talk was moved to Track 1 which was more spacious. Noufal then took the stage with his talk on using Emacs as a Python IDE, which then got side tracked to org mode. The rest of the day I spent chit-chatting.

Day 3

Sunday meant, my talk had to be delivered soon, and my slides were somewhat ready. Nevertheless I spend some (a_lot_of) time retouching the slides and doing up code examples. I was there, half-attentive to Jace's talk on the LastUser Service. It looked interesting and I am planning to use it for the FUDCon COD installation. After lunch and coffee, (and an indecent where I mixed up my laptop with Anurag's, and spend multiple attempts trying to log-in into his system), I gave my talk, on developing Django Apps based on REST Architecture (slides| video). For what it's worth, it wasn't very well received by the audience. Also this was the largest audience I ever had. Met people and photographed then the rest of the day.